Cirth: U+E080 - U+E0FF

Proposals 1993-04-08, 1996-05-06; revision 1997-11-03

NOTE: This is still a proposed encoding and has not been standardized. A discussion paper is available here

The Cirth script was invented by the philologist and author
J. R. R. Tolkien as part of the mythological world he created and
was widely popularized through his work, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, etc. Along with a family of artificial languages and a large corpus of
etymological data describing their relationships, the Cirth
script has attracted the attention of a large community of
linguists and other enthusiasts interested in this expression of
Tolkien's expertise in historical and comparative linguistics.
It can be categorized as a
Category D (Attested Extinct) alphabet: there is a relatively limited
corpus, and a relatively small (but existent) scholarly body studying it. In
order to set a standard Cirth character coding for such
scholars and enthusiasts, it has been suggested that this
character set be included into the Unicode standard and ISO 10646.

8 columns are reserved to encode the Cirth. The last column is currently unused, and is reserved for future discoveries in the Tolkien manuscripts. The Cirth was and is used to write the languages Sindarin, Khuzdul, and others. It has also been used to write English, as on the title page
of The Lord Of The Rings.

General Principles of the Cirth script

The Cirth are a Runic-type alphabet, although they are not connected
with Nordic runes except due to a general resemblance resulting from
the constraints of letterforms carved in wood or stone. Some of the Cirth had two
different forms, which represented glyphic variants in some languages, but could be used for different purposes in others. The Cirth
were written from left to right. No positional variants or non-spacing
marks exist.

Ordering follows the presentation of the Angerthas Daeron with its Eregion and Morian extensions (from The Return of the King, Appendix E), to which the earliest Beleriand runes, additional early Doriathrin and Noldorin Cirth, and other Cirth used for English, etc. have been added following the same structural order (from The Treason of Isengard, Appendix on Runes, and other sources). Where duplication in letter names occurs, a modifier has been added to the name to differentiate it from the primary form. Pronouncible or meaningful names are not known for the Cirth, so their phonetic values are given in the names. Long vowels are written doubled.

Punctuation

Little is known about punctuation marks, though four have been identified: a single dot serves sometimes to separate letters or words; two vertical
dots is used to break up groups longer than a word; three or four vertical dots are used at the beginning and ending of texts. Only three Cirth
digits are extant; each is formed by placing a dot beneath an existing Certh, so that non-spacing dot has been encoded here.

Sometimes word space is not used; word separation may be achieved in that case with U+200B,
ZERO WIDTH SPACE. Hyphenation is not used; words may be broken after any LETTER.